Category Archives for Staying Motivated to Practice

Resist the urge to ad lib your practice. Instead set the intention that it is a fully planned project with benchmarks and specific, measurable goals.

Realize that the project is your responsibility, that you won’t depend on a teacher, coach or anyone else for results.

Write it all down in a short practice project document. The final goal, the estimated timeline, the benchmarks along the way.

Read your practice document before you begin each practice session.

While you practice, add simple notes to your document. Specific practice strategies, any helpful notes, and percentage of completion toward benchmarks and final goals.

Build in some slack. Allow more time than you think you need at the beginning, it feels much better to finish early. Falling behind feels like failure.

Be obsessive about defining goals and objectives in great detail. Without this, you’ll never be sure when your project is complete.

When it’s time, move on rather than seeking perfection. But take the time to write down exactly what worked and what didn’t. So next time you’ll be able to move the project further and your playing will get stronger.

You’ve crash landed on a desert isle with only your instrument. No music or books of any kind, and nothing committed to memory. And you can still develop (or maintain) virtuoso level skills on your violin. Simply play scales.

This much maligned musical element has a huge image problem: it is associated with the screeching, torturous notes of beginning players. And mind numbing boredom.

Still, everything you need to know about the violin can be found in a simple scale. Pitch, rhythm, tone production and every known technical feat on the bow or in the left hand can be embedded in a simple scale routine. Even musical gestures and phrasing can be cultivated through the lowly scale.

In fact, the scale is the most utilitarian of all-in-one practice tools, as I have written and often told students. Mostly, they seem unconvinced, offering only a blank stare.

When you come to accept this gospel of scales, it signals that you have made an important transition as a musician. You have finally embraced that practicing is about process, as much as it is about musical content. Pieces and etudes can become extraneous distractions to the work at hand.

Another way to say it, think of practice in its Eastern sense as a state of being. Release the Western implication that it is a verb.

Scales are a perfect fit for this Zen of practice. They can create a spacious sense around your daily work. Scales offer you the promise of pure, high quality practice. This, in turn, enables you to truly master the fundamentals with a higher sense of ease, clarity and purpose.

Try this: next time you stuck on a musical or technical problem in your favorite song or piece, simplify that problem by copying and pasting it onto a scale. You’ll immediately gain a fresh perspective plus new clarity on causes and solutions.

Your transformation: the violin teaches us to clarify and simplify what seems complex and to move through life with ease.

Instead, start by finding or creating ten distinctly different ways to improve it. Even the smallest improvement counts. Do that, and not only have you improved your song, you’ve also gained ten new problem solving skills which can be applied to future musical challenges. Your violin practice time was a high payoff activity that will save countless hours of work moving forward.

When all is said and done you are:
1. A more skilled and thus more desirable musician
2. A more effective human being who has trained her brain to do high quality, creative work in any situation.

If you are going to play the violin (or any instrument) for a lifetime, choose projects that are meaningful to you. This as opposed to chasing trends or selecting music you think might be popular to others.

When all is said and done, it’s only the projects you care about that end up adding more value to others.

Do this, and 20 years from now you’ll still be playing your violin, while others’ instruments are merely collecting dust.